Science
Related: About this forumAre Men Idiots Who Do Stupid Things? Study Says Yes
A new study shows what at least some of us might have suspected for a long time: Men are idiots and do stupid things.
That's the premise of the authors' Male Idiot Theory. The study, published in BMJ, the former British Medical Journal, looked at past winners of the Darwin Awards. The awards are given to those people who die in such an idiotic manner that "their action ensures the long-term survival of the species, by selectively allowing one less idiot to survive."
The study looked at 318 cases, of which 282, or 88.7 percent, were men.
Limitations of the study, the authors noted, include its retrospective nature, selection bias women may be more likely to nominate men and reporting bias male candidates for the award may be more newsworthy than female candidates. But the authors wrote:
"Despite these limitations there can be little doubt that Darwin Award winners seem to make little or no real assessment of the risk or attempt at risk management. They just do it anyway. In some cases, the intelligence of the award winner may be questioned. For example, the office workers watching a construction worker demolishing a car park in the adjacent lot must have wondered about the man's intelligence. After two days of office speculation how does he plan to remove the final support to crash the car park down safely? they discovered, on the third day, that he didn't have a plan. The concrete platform collapsed, crushing him to death and flattening his mini-excavator."
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/12/12/370414365/are-men-idiots-who-do-stupid-things-study-says-yes
VanillaRhapsody
(21,115 posts)"Hey Y'all....watch this!"
Testosterone is a dangerous drug....
Laffy Kat
(16,354 posts)It's actually: "Hey Y'all, hold this and watch me!"
Fumesucker
(45,851 posts)It's "Hold mah beer an watch this".
Xipe Totec
(43,872 posts)Fortinbras Armstrong
(4,473 posts)When I was in the army, I sat on a board of enquiry looking into how one young officer managed to put an M60 tank into a ravine. No one was killed, but the $1.2 million tank was totaled. It turned out to be sheer stupidity, the tank commander and the tank driver bet each other on just how close to the edge of the ravine they could go.